Going through a divorce is often a challenging event in life, yet it is often something that is inevitable. There can be many challenges during a divorce, but one of the top ones you might face is determining how to divide your assets and debts. Here are some of the ways this task can be challenging.
Determining Who the Assets and Debts Belong to
The first challenge with dividing assets is determining who the assets belong to, and this factor is often controlled by the way your state handles ownership of assets. In some states, everything a couple owns is considered equally owned, while other states have rules that give spouses rights to assets if they had them prior to marriage or acquired them individually during the marriage. Determining who each assets belongs to is one of the first challenges you may face during your case.
When it comes to debts, there is also a challenge with determining who is responsible for them. For example, if you have credit card debts in your marriage, who really owes the balances on the cards? Is it a 50-50 split, or is there some other way of handling the division?
Finding a Way to Split The Assets and Debts
A second challenge with assets is finding a way to split them when they are considered equally owned, and a house is a good example of this. You cannot cut a house in half as a way of dividing it. Instead, one spouse will buy the other one out, or the couple will work out some other deal to divide it. Splitting some assets is not hard, such as cash, but splitting most of them may prove difficult during your divorce.
Finding a way to split debts is also very challenging in many divorce cases, and the easiest solution is to pay everything off so there is no debt left. Unfortunately, this is not always an option, unless a couple decides to liquidate their entire estate. If you do not want to liquidate or if you do not have cash to pay everything off, you will need to find a fair way to divide all the debts you have.
Your lawyer is the person that will be there to help you determine which spouse owns the assets and which ones owes the money for the debts. If you have questions about this, contact your divorce lawyer today.
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